Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/464

436PROP. VIII.———— claimant who may be pointed out, and to give honour to whom honour is due. But meanwhile, this system may be permitted to hold possession of it as its own peculiar discovery—a circumstance which is mentioned, because those who may favour these Institutes with their attention, may perhaps have some inclination to know wherein, more particularly, their originality is supposed to consist. They claim to have announced for the first time the true law of ignorance, and to have deduced from it its consequences.

4. If this doctrine of ignorance has been missed by previous inquirers, the cause of the oversight is to be found in the inaccuracy of their observations in regard to the object of all knowledge. Until this had been fixed as consisting necessarily of an objective and a subjective element no theory determining demonstrably the object of all ignorance was possible. But we have seen throughout the epistemology, how loose, wavering, inexact erroneous, and indeed contradictory, the opinions of philosophers in general, and of psychologists in particular, have been in regard to the object of knowledge; and hence it is not surprising that their opinions should have been equally confused, or rather more confused and unsettled, in regard to the object of ignorance. Many previous approximations, indeed, have been made to the true theory of knowledge. It has been